The Hotel Sacher is a five-star hotel located in the Innere Stadt first district of Vienna, Austria, vis-à-vis to the Vienna State Opera. It is famous for the specialty of the house, the Sachertorte, a chocolate cake with apricot filling. There is also an art gallery in the hotel with works from the 19th century. The hotel is built near the former residence of Antonio Vivaldi.

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The hotel was founded in 1876 as a maison meublée at the site of the demolished Theater am Kärntnertor by the restaurateur and k.u.k. purveyor to the court Eduard Sacher (1843–1892). His father, the confectioner Franz Sacher (1816–1907) had become famous for his Sachertorte, which he allegedly created for a reception given by Austrian State Chnacellor Klemens von Metternich in 1832. Eduard Sacher did an apprenticeship at the patisserie Demel and in 1873 opened his first restaurant on Kärntner Straße.

In 1880 he married Anna Sacher née Fuchs (1859–1930), who became hotel manager after his death. She quickly earned a reputation for both her commercial skills and her eccentricity, never been seen without her French Bulldogs and a cigar. Under her rule, Hotel Sacher became one of the finest hotels in the world, where the aristocracy and diplomats would meet. However, after World War I Anna Sacher upheld the upper-class reputation of the hotel and denied service to guests of non-aristocratic descent, at the same time granting generous credit to impoverished aristocrats. Her management ran the business into financial problems[1] and eventually to bankruptcy and change of ownership in the 1930s.[2]

In 1934, the hotel business was taken over by the Gürtler family under the company name "Eduard Sacher GmbH & Co OHG" and the building was extensively renovated. After the end of World War II, Allied-occupied Austria, like Germany, was divided into four zones by the victorious powers. Vienna, like Berlin, was also subdivided into four zones. During the occupation the British used the hardly damaged Sacher Hotel as their headquarters and it appears in Carol Reed's film The Third Man as script writer Graham Greene during research in Vienna was a regular at the hotel bar.

Evening in the lounge

Since 1989 the Gürtler family also owns the former Österreichischer Hof hotel in Salzburg which reopened as Hotel Sacher Salzburg. The Sacher Hotel in Vienna added another floor with a spacious spa area on its roof in 2005/06, which caused a stir with historical preservationists. The Sachertorte is still served in the hotel restaurant after decades of litigation with the Demel patisserie were brought to an end.